10/04/13 – Kelley B. Vlahos – The Scott Horton Show

Kelley B. Vlahos, a regular Antiwar.com columnist and contributing editor at The American Conservative, discusses the media’s lousy coverage of the D.C. car chase/shooting; the militarization of trigger happy law enforcement officers; and the link between the military’s prescription drug addiction and the record number of soldiers committing suicide.

3 Comments

Liza Persson
on October 5, 2013 at 6:25 am

Hi Scott

I just finished listening to your interview with Kelly B Vlahos. It was a great piece – both the podcast and her article as well as her blog post. Overall, you have become one of my staple podcasts. That says a lot given that I come from a political perspective that if needed to be categorized probably would approximate social democratic; of course, that perspective developed in a country where that approach to governing appeared to have worked. Here in the US, I do not feel that it would.

I have written that only four the US have I found myself to believe something like libertarianism would be the best, although I find it hard to believe that with the global interdependency, it would be possible to achieve anything like a libertarian way of governing on a national level, sufficiently unpolluted to have a fair chance of proving itself.

Anyway, I wanted to let you know that you have a Swedish social Democrat, born from a long line of socialists, among your most frequent listeners.

persnipoles
on October 5, 2013 at 12:34 pm

Hhhmmmm. And there was mis-coverage of the Boston bombing, too. Whoops, too much time on this already. …might be worth a show with Kelly on crappy coverage of some more of these ‘big’ psychologically significant events and the ‘opportunistic’ propaganda that comes up with them… She seems to have a sense of certain patterns.

Liza Persson
on October 6, 2013 at 10:43 pm

I. agree on your overall diagnosis of the social decease beghind the DC shooting
The promiximity to the White House does not make this anything else that just another one of hundreds of reported and many more unreported cases of abuse of authority by those who are granted the right to use force without being presumed guilty until proven innocent; be that military or police personnel (line getting more and more blurry)
I guess it would be unintended bonus if this could be used to hype yet more the mental illness issue- of course, it is not wrong to say that there is illness of the heart and mind behind, but the profit made by media and politicians by hyping is never made by characterizing correctly who are the ones really sick, and what is the most sick about it. And of course no deeper analysis is ever possible.

So, I thank you for anastute and perceptive account.
I disagree with the sense of making equally useless the Swedish and US systems cor distributing the resources belonging to the respetive nations.
But I will want to diwcuss this further onky dif you, or anyone is interested. I do not want to preach or teach or rant, and that is all I would do if there is noone who wants to discuss